


Hand Print

by moretomhardy



Series: Paw Print AU [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski are Soulmates, F/M, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, The Hale Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 12:13:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8844574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moretomhardy/pseuds/moretomhardy
Summary: As was typical for a werewolf pack, the Hales had a diverse collection of bite marks, animal tracks, and feathers for soulmarks. Supernatural creatures were more likely to bond with other supernatural creatures, which, while useful for supporting the idea that such unusual soulmarks were a genetic anomaly, was not very helpful for hiding one’s supernatural identity from hunters. It was an old hunter’s trick to look for groups of people with unusual soulmarks when on the hunt for anything “mythical.”Derek was five years old, and he didn’t have a soulmark at all.





	

As was typical for a werewolf pack, the Hales had a diverse collection of bite marks, animal tracks, and feathers for soulmarks. Supernatural creatures were more likely to bond with other supernatural creatures, which, while useful for supporting the idea that such unusual soulmarks were a genetic anomaly, was not very helpful for hiding one’s supernatural identity from hunters. It was an old hunter’s trick to look for groups of people with unusual soulmarks when on the hunt for anything “mythical.”

Derek was five years old, and he didn’t have a soulmark at all. 

Laura got hers when she was two, a typically light teal hoofprint (restlessness) smudged over the left side of her jaw. She fretted often over her soulmate’s unsettled spirit, but Derek thought she should be happy that she had a soulmark at all. Derek’s mother explained over and over that he would get his soulmark soon, but after Derek turned four, she started to frown as she said it.

Derek was less and less convinced with every week that passed, and with every cousin’s mark that came in while his own skin stayed stubbornly blank.

“Everyone gets a soulmark, Derek, you just have to be patient,” Mom soothed the day Cora was born, tiny and pink and already with a wavering, bright orange handprint (confidence) tucked under her collarbone. (Nobody quite knew what the ghostly marks around Cora’s soulmark meant, except that Cora’s soulmate wasn’t a human, or, at least, not quite.)

Derek wasn’t persuaded. It was only him and 6-month-old Macey who were left without soulmarks in the whole entire pack. Then the next week, Macey got a set of molten gold fang marks on his arm, and while the rest of the pack worried over Macey being destined to mate with a vampire, all Derek felt was envy.

Everyone did eventually get a soulmark, even if they sometimes came in already scarred over with death, and Derek was no exception in the end. He raised a few eyebrows when he finally got a bright green handprint (curiosity) wrapped around his left hip a few months after his sixth birthday. It could be dangerous for a werewolf to have a human-shaped soulmark; it could make them too eager to integrate into human society, and too ready to trust humans implicitly. Derek didn’t care. His soulmark was without a doubt the best thing to happen in his whole life.

Derek’s mark was the most unstable in the pack, regularly rolling from bright teal (studiousness) to green (curiousity) to spring (enthusiasm) to yellow (joy) and back throughout any given day, sometimes within the space of an hour. Derek liked the semi-constant tingle of his mark changing colors, reminding him that it was finally there. He loved pulling up his shirt to check on it, and he loved every single color it turned, even when it washed deep indigo (sadness), or dark teal (exhaustion).

Mom worried about the fluctuating state of Derek’s soulmark sometimes when it hadn’t showed any signs of settling down after a few years. Derek didn’t know why. The colors changed a lot, sure, but there wasn’t anything wrong. Derek knew. He had checked out book after book on soulmarks from the library, and every single one of the colors was good. Even the dark ones were positive reactions to stress according to every book out there. So yeah, sometimes his soulmate really got on an emotional roll and Derek could pull up his shirt to watch his mark change colors like a kaleidoscope, but Derek liked it. His soulmate was someone completely unique, and Derek wouldn’t have it any other way.

Then Derek entered high school, and suddenly soulmarks became private affairs. People with marks in obvious places got gloves or sleeves to cover them up. Laura even started wearing a patch over the pale hoofprint on her jaw. She painted the patches and called them a fashion statement, but Derek knew she was tired of people giving her funny looks for the way her soulmate seemed stuck in pastel colors and shades that screamed, “disconnected.”

Derek didn’t have to do anything as dramatic as that, but he did have to stop rucking his shirt up to greet a new color every time his mark shivered with a change. He tried to complain to his mother about it, but she just smiled.

“High school is when everyone’s emotions start going crazy, Derek, and often in a negative way. People can feel protective of their mate’s emotions. Some people are even figuring out who their mates are, and it’s scary when you first realize that your emotions are out there on someone else’s skin for the whole world to see, especially once you’ve told everyone else who your mate is. But if you want to show your soulmark, there’s no one who can tell you you can’t.”

“Mom, are you kidding? I looked at it in class the other day and everyone looked at me like I was sick. Forrest cornered me before practice and told me I was crazy for showing off my mark like that. I hate keeping it covered.”

“I know it must be hard when your mark changes so often. I remember running to the bathroom to check every time my mark changed in high school,” Mom grinned, running her fingers through Derek’s hair. “But there’s nothing wrong with looking at your own soulmark whenever and wherever you want to unless your mate tells you they’re uncomfortable with it. Until then, you can tell Forrest to mind his own business. Alright?”

Derek sighed and flopped backwards on the couch. “I don’t want to become a social reject, Mom.”

Two months later, Derek forced a sound out of a triangle and fell head over heels for a girl named Paige. A month after that, Derek asked his mother how she knew Dad was her soulmate. She smiled and ruffled his hair as she said, “I was in love. Ridiculously, stupidly in love. I already had a pretty good idea he was my soulmate; I knew my mark’s colors and I could match his moods to my mark’s changes. So I told your dad I wanted to know for sure if we were matched, asked him if he wanted to know, too. He said yes, so we stopped covering our marks. After that, it only took a couple of days. It’s pretty damning to see your own emotions play out on someone else’s body like that. We let it go on for a couple of weeks to make absolutely certain, and the rest is history.”

Derek knew he was in love. It was harder to figure out if Paige was his soulmate since his mark changed color so often. He was never really certain what the newest fizz of sensation up his side might mean for Paige, and sometimes he wondered if her temperament really matched the riotous greens and yellows that dominated Derek’s mark. She seemed so calm, certainly his mark should have more blues in it if he was hers, shouldn’t it? But there was always the teal (intelligence and studiousness) that kept Derek hoping. Paige was joyful (yellow), Paige was curious (green), and Paige was enthusiastic (spring) about her music and, well, about Derek, it seemed like.

Paige’s soulmark was on her forearm, and she kept it religiously covered. Derek asked once, twice, three times in the ensuing months if she would show him, but she just smiled and changed the subject, distracted him, kissed him instead. Sometimes Derek’s shirt got pulled up while they were making out, but Paige always kept her eyes carefully averted and tucked Derek’s shirt in for him so it wouldn’t happen again. Derek offered to show her, asked her to look, nearly begged her by the end, but she would only rest her hand over Derek’s mark through his shirt and say not yet.

That fall, Derek let Peter talk him into giving Paige the bite.

That fall, Derek killed Paige.

 

His soulmark remained as bright and mercurial as ever.

 

So that was one question answered.

 

Mom told everyone it was a car crash. Slick roads and an inexperienced driver.

Derek didn’t tell anyone anything at all. He played a lot of basketball instead; no one bothered him when he was moving.

Derek stopped looking at his soulmark after that night. He started buying patches to cover it so he wouldn’t be tempted to check on it. The itch of the changing mark nearly drove him crazy, but he figured that was the least he deserved.

A few weeks later, Derek met Kate. Derek knew Kate wasn’t his soulmate, wasn’t even close. Derek was pretty sure Kate didn’t like him for anything except his body, but that was okay. Derek didn’t want anything sweet. He gave Kate his body, and she gave him empty headspace, demanding all of his attention until there was none left to dwell on anything else. It was a good trade, as far as Derek cared.

Until Derek started caring too much. He should have expected it, seeing how he fell for Paige in a single day. Kate was… well, Derek didn’t think she liked him any more than she had at the beginning. But Derek was getting pretty good at repressing emotions by now, so what was one more.

Mom was worried about Derek; hell, the whole pack was worried about Derek. Even Peter seemed worried about Derek, but Derek still couldn’t stand to talk to him. Mom tried to talk to Derek, Laura tried to talk to Derek, Aunt Melanie and Uncle Lee and Aunt Grace and Morgan and James and Macey and even Cora all tried to talk to Derek.

Derek didn’t say much.

Kate picked Derek up from home one day (stupid risk, Mom would be so furious if she found out about Kate), and seemed fascinated with the house. Derek told her all about the tunnels underneath, showed her a couple days later when she asked to see. She got so excited she fucked him right there on the floor of the basement, Derek straining his ears the whole time for anyone coming down the stairs (such a stupid risk, Mom would be apoplectic if she found them, but it was nice to feel _something_ , even if it was throat-clogging anxiety).

Kate asked about Derek’s family a few times, and he told her about their annual reunion in January when it was a couple of weeks away.

Derek had a basketball game the night of the wolf moon. Laura stayed to watch and drive him home after while everyone else was at home getting ready for the celebration. Halfway through the game, Derek felt a sick swooping sensation in his gut. He fell to hands and knees as his vision fuzzed out for an extended second. He heard Laura scream, looked up to see her eyes boring through the haze in his vision, red as yew berries. Derek’s heart stopped. He couldn’t breathe. Forrest had him by the shoulders, asking if he was okay, but Derek couldn’t do anything other than watch Laura scramble down the bleachers.

“Derek,” Laura croaked when she got to him grabbing his arms with fingers most of the way to claws.

“I need to go home,” Derek whispered with what breath was left in his lungs. Laura just stared at him, eyes back to brown and huge in her white face. Her claws dug into Derek’s skin, not quite sharp enough yet to draw blood.

Forrest got his hand in Derek’s hair and reminded him to breathe.

Laura snapped back to motion as Derek gulped in a shuddering breath. “Yeah, okay, let’s get you home.” Her voice shook as she pulled him up and out of Forrest’s hands, but she was solid on her feet as Derek stumbled into her side. “Come on.” She kept a strong arm around Derek’s shoulders and guided his stumbling steps off the court and straight out to the car, heedless of the concerned questions coming at them from all sides.

They smelled smoke before they even got to the turnoff, and they could see the flames from the bottom of the driveway. By the time Laura skidded to a stop in front of the house it was already collapsing in on itself. Laura tore out of the car and was halfway up the sidewalk before Derek even managed to get his seatbelt off. A deputy and a fireman caught her before she could run into the fire while Derek stumbled his way out of the car. He made it two steps before he collapsed again, shaking, barely breathing, vision smudging as tears dripped down his face.

He thought he should be raging like Laura, barely holding himself in human shape, but it was all he could to do not to choke on his own gasps in the face of the hollow place in his chest where his pack used to be.

Someone dropped a jacket around Derek’s shoulders as they came to crouch next to him. A deputy, Derek realized when he looked up and saw the uniform. The deputy put his arm around Derek, who listed into his chest.

“Oh, son.” The deputy’s voice was thick as he pulled Derek closer with his other arm. Derek buried his face in the deputy’s shoulder to block the sight of the fire and the heat of the flames. His hand skated over raised flesh on the deputy’s forearm, and he looked down to see a freshly scarred-over soulmark, still bumpy and an angry pink color. He fisted his hands in the deputy’s uniform and tried not to shake too much against him.

Someone shouted nearby, and the deputy pulled back a little. “Son, do you think you could call your sister back?”

Derek raised his head to see Laura still fighting to get to the house, several fireman having joined the original pair trying to hold Laura back. Her shouts were getting close to roars.

Derek swallowed and tried to clear his throat. “Laura,” he called, wavering and watery. She spun around immediately, red sparking in her eyes, a perfect match to the inferno behind her. Laura’s whole body seemed to crumple at the sight of Derek, and she threw herself back across the yard, wrapping herself tightly around him. Derek returned her embrace with one arm; he couldn’t seem to let go of the deputy with the other.

They stayed like that for several more minutes until the Sheriff approached them to express his bottled sympathies and ask them to give a statement back at the Sheriff’s Department. Laura was furious again as she argued over whether she was fit to drive herself to the Sheriff’s station, launching to her feet to get up in the Sheriff’s face. Without Laura’s support, Derek slumped back against the deputy, who gently nudged Derek to his feet and then kept him there when it became evident Derek couldn’t do it on his own.

Eventually Laura allowed the deputy still holding Derek up to drive them to the police station, shoving Derek into the back seat and slamming the door viciously as she climbed in behind him. Everything was a blur after that, stumbling into the Sheriff’s station after Laura, sitting on a bench by himself while the Sheriff talked to Laura first, clutching the deputy’s jacket closer around his shoulders while he shook and shook.

The Sheriff came for Derek next, but Laura refused to leave the room. “He’s a minor,” she snarled, “and I’m his guardian now. Our parents filed all the paperwork when I turned eighteen, you can look it up yourself.” The Sheriff tried to argue back, but Laura wouldn’t budge.

Derek didn’t have much to say, anyways. “I don’t know,” he repeated over and over again to the Sheriff’s questions.

Frustration was thick in the Sheriff’s scent when he finally herded Derek and Laura out of his office. The deputy was there again, face concerned and tired. “Do the two of you have anywhere to go?” he asked.

Laura shook her head while Derek tried to swallow passed the lump in his throat.

“Deputy Graeme has offered the use of her guest bedroom if you would like it, for however long you need.” The deputy gestured to the uniformed woman standing beside him.

Laura was silent for a fraction of a second before nodding. “Thank you, Deputy, we’d appreciate that a lot.”

Deputy Graeme smiled gently, and then Laura was shepherding Derek into the back of a cruiser, and then into a sparse, dusty bedroom. Derek didn’t know what he was supposed to do; he was still in his basketball uniform, and he had left his change of clothes in his locker at school.

Laura told him to take off his shoes, so he did. She told him to go drink some water, so he did. She told him to get into bed, so he did. She got in next to him and curled her body around his. Derek realized that he still hadn’t stopped shaking when Laura pulled him in close, her nose tucked behind his ear.

The next morning, Derek got out of bed to use the bathroom, then got back in again because he didn’t know what else to do. He pushed his face into Laura’s neck and tried to blink away the tears forming behind his eyelids. Laura woke with a snuffle, pushing at Derek briefly before freezing and pulling him back in.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered after a long moment.

“Okay.” Derek didn’t have much of an opinion. Laura could do whatever she wanted.

“We both know that couldn’t have been an accident,” Laura’s voice caught and broke. “The Argents set that fire, and they’ll be back for us, too.”

Derek stopped breathing. No. No no no. It couldn’t -- It couldn’t be Kate. It couldn’t be Derek’s fault, he couldn’t have killed his whole pack.

“What?” Derek croaked.

“The Argents; they’re the hunters Mom was always worried about. And with good reason,” Laura choked.

Derek felt like he was falling. Like he was just fucking falling, without anything to grab onto or any ground to end the dive.

“Why didn’t she tell me who they were?” he managed after a long minute.

“She was waiting until you and Cora were old enough.” Derek heard teardrops hitting the pillow above his head. “She told me everything when I turned eighteen.”

Derek shuddered as he felt something slimy reach up and wrap itself around his heart.

Laura spent the day talking to people and making arrangements. Derek didn’t get out of bed. Someone had gotten his bag for him after the game and dropped it off at the Sheriff’s Department after they heard the news, and Deputy Graeme brought it in with a kind smile that afternoon.

Derek pulled out his phone and mechanically opened a message from Kate.

_“I hear two little rats escaped the trap. Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll finish the job. You know how I hate loose ends.”_

Derek was shaking again. He deleted the message, along with Kate’s number and everything else she had ever sent him. He curled up in the bed and cried until Laura came back that evening.

Laura hustled Derek out of bed, into his change of clothes (which still smelled like _home_ and _pack_ and Derek was crying again), and into the car, which the deputies had brought up at some point that day from the Sheriff’s Department.

They were several minutes outside of Beacon Hills before Derek asked where they were going. Laura shook her head, knuckles white on the steering wheel. “I don’t know,” she said. “Somewhere far away from here.”

Derek just nodded.

They drove aimlessly for several days, going in no clear direction, but trending eastward and south. They stayed in cheap hotels and curled up in single beds together. Laura didn’t sleep much, always already awake when Derek woke from his latest nightmare, shaking and panting so quickly he could hardly breathe. Derek slept in every spare second, guilt sitting heavy between his ribs and making every waking breath a struggle to pull in.

They ended up in Amarillo after a while. The air was cold and dry, the land flat and treeless, and a couple inches of snow coated the ground. Laura seemed to like it. Derek… didn’t really have an opinion.

Laura said she was going to start looking for jobs. Derek nodded and pulled the covers over his head. An unknown number with a Beacon Hills area code called while Laura was out. Derek panicked, dropped his phone in the toilet and told Laura it was an accident when she came back. You could find people with a phone number and a hunter (a hunter like _Kate_ ) would certainly know how to do that. Derek couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that sooner.

He started keeping a sharper eye out for hunters, he stopped sleeping so much, stopped sleeping almost entirely. Laura got a job at a Whataburger and started pulling all the shifts she could. She finally started sleeping, tired after long hours at work. Derek started taking long walks out in the cold, patrolling around their hotel and Laura’s Whataburger for hunters. He got frostbite a few times, and the pain as he healed was grounding. The next full moon came, and Derek figured out pain was a pretty good anchor. Laura frowned at the bloody marks on his arms, but she couldn’t argue with his explanation.

They stayed there for three months before Derek smelled wolfsbane on one of his walks. He ran home to tell Laura. She listened to him, grim-faced, and called their landlord. Derek packed up the few belongings they had had in the apartment they had leased while Laura invented a family emergency and promised to pay out the lease even if they didn’t return. She quit her job on the same excuse, and they drove out that evening with little fuss.

They pinballed around the nation for a few weeks with no destination in mind. They didn’t catch sight or scent of hunters again.

In a run-down motel in Indiana, Derek really looked at his soulmark for the first time in about ten months. It was the same bright green it had always favored most, and Derek nearly choked on a throatful of tears as he carefully set trembling fingers over it.

He stopped wearing the patch, started watching its every color change once again, the old, familiar cycle of curiosity, enthusiasm, intelligence, and joy only a little changed by time. Tired and overwhelmed (dark teal) appeared more often than Derek remembered. Some new colors cropped up from time to time, anxiety and self doubt (dirty spring green) and recklessness (cloudy, dark green) that made Derek stroke his mark and wish he could _do_ something about it. There was also protectiveness (dark gold) and energy (pale red) that made Derek feel a little lighter when they appeared. It was good to feel someone else’s emotions, to get out of his own head for a few seconds now and again.

Eventually, Laura decided to settle in New York.

They got another apartment. Laura got another job and started studying for the GED. In July, Laura mentioned something about Derek going back to school. Derek recoiled at the thought (all that time sitting still, no, he didn’t want to get that far into his own head), and started applying for jobs instead. Laura frowned when he told her he got one a few weeks later, but she didn’t try to stop him and, more importantly, didn’t try to make him go to school.

The job helped. He still had trouble sleeping, still had terrible nightmares when he managed it, and he still went for walks at one in the morning to satisfy his paranoia, but it turned out physical labor was a great way to keep his mind busy.

Laura got her GED in October, and Derek caught her looking at college applications online. He told her to go for it. He didn’t make much, but he made enough to cover the rent for their tiny apartment, and they had the inheritance and the life insurance to cover tuition and groceries.

Laura got into NYU. She decided to major in social work. She got a scholarship to cover a few thousand dollars a year, and she started putting in as many hours as she could into her job to save up. That added up to a few solitary dinners a week for Derek. It was a little lonely, but he didn’t have anyone else to blame but himself for that.

Derek replaced his walks with runs, covered twice as much ground or the same ground twice, depending on his mood that day. It settled him a little, to know every back alley in the neighborhood by heart.

A team of hunters passed through in March, but Derek didn’t panic this time. The hunters spoke with a Boston accent so grating it couldn’t be anything other than genuine, so Derek figured it was unlikely they were in league with the Argents. He stayed extra vigilant for the two weeks they were nearby and kept meticulous tabs on their whereabouts, but they moved on without causing any trouble that Derek could see.

In June, Derek got a new job working construction. It didn’t pay that much more than his old job, but it got him outside. Derek liked it. He hadn’t liked anything in a long time, so, that was probably a good sign. He told Laura after his first day, and she smiled at him as she stumbled her way to bed. Derek stood in the living room by himself for a while after that. It wasn’t -- he understood why Laura was working so much, he was happy she was going to go to college when it seemed to make her so happy, but -- he missed her. He wasn’t going to say anything, not when this whole thing was his fault anyways, but, he just… missed her.

It got worse after Laura actually started going to school. All the time she didn’t spend in class or working part time at her job, she spent at the library studying with her classmates. She was making friends, and that was good. It just meant that Derek sat at home by himself a lot.

In October, a pack that lived nearby the NYU campus approached Laura to arrange an official meeting. Derek came along, of course, rounding out their pathetic pack of two. The other pack, the Haversmiths, invited Laura and Derek to spend time with them. Laura politely declined, too busy with work and school, but Derek was lonely, and seeing a pack for the first time in a year and a half cracked something open inside of him. He agreed almost immediately.

The Haversmith pack was not like the Hale pack. The Hales had been peaceful, keeping hunters at bay with how gentle they were, but the Haversmiths believed in fighting when threatened. Derek liked this new way. If his mother had only told him who the hunters were, he would have never never never so much as spoken to an Argent in his life, and his pack would still be alive.

The new pack was a little shocked when Derek flashed blue eyes at them for the first time. “It - it was an accident,” he stumbled over his explanation to Alpha Haversmith. “She was already dying, she was in pain, and I… ended it for her.” It seemed to hold up. Alpha clucked her tongue and said, “Poor little lamb,” and that was the end of it.

The Haversmiths took Derek under their wing. They taught him how to fight, how to take pain and how to inflict it. The Haversmiths fought real fights, and soon Derek was joining them against rival packs and hunter clans alike. Derek learned that his blue eyes were an advantage; a threat that the pack was willing to do whatever it took to protect themselves. He learned how to disable a human without killing them. He learned werewolves could reattach body parts if they hadn’t been severed for too long. He learned how to sharpen his senses until nothing escaped his notice. He learned how to heal from wolfsbane poisoning. He learned just how much 10,000 volts of electricity hurt.

Laura worried on the rare occasion she was home to catch him coming back smelling like blood or poison, but she was too busy to do anything about it and Derek liked it too much to stop on his own. The best part was that between spending all day on a job site, training with the Haversmiths on evenings and weekends, and pack emergencies at 2 AM, Derek rarely had the energy for nightmares anymore. 

When the two year anniversary of the fire rolled around that January, Derek was… well, he wouldn’t say he was doing _good_ , but he was definitely doing okay. He had some tentative friends in the Haversmith pack, no matter how Laura frowned about it. He kept religious tabs on his soul mark, trending more protective (dark gold) lately. He could sleep at night most of the time, and he could get out of bed in the morning.

Laura hounded him about going back to school sometimes. Derek didn't see the value in it, but she was getting more and more aggressive about wanting him to at least get a GED.

“Do you really think you’re going to work construction your whole life, Derek? _That's_ what you want to do?” Laura would shout once she’d lost her patience.

“Yes,” Derek would snarl right back. “I’m a werewolf, Laura, I cannot get injured and old age will barely affect me, this is the perfect job for me!”

No one ever won those arguments. They ended when Derek and Laura got tired of fighting, only to rekindle the next time Laura brought up the idea.

By the time Laura entered her final year at NYU, Derek thought he could say he was doing good. He had friends in the Haversmiths, he was doing well at his job, and he hardly ever had nightmares anymore, whether he was exhausted when he went to bed or not.

Laura graduated that December, a semester early, and the whole Haversmith pack came to watch the ceremony. Laura still wasn’t close to any of the Haversmiths, content with her human friends from NYU, but they came to help Derek support his alpha-sister, and they cheered louder than anyone in the room when she walked the stage.

Laura already had a job lined up, and Derek was as proud of her as he could be. He still didn’t think he would ever get a degree of any kind.

Laura warmed to the Haversmiths over the next year, able to get to know them since she was less busy with school out of the picture. She still thought they were too violent and too quick to act, and she had some uncomfortable staredowns with Alpha Haversmith when their ideals clashed, but she got along with them most of the time.

At the beginning of January the year after Laura graduated, she got a strange letter in the mail. The return address said only “Beacon Hills,” and inside was a picture of a deer with a spiral carved into its side. Laura wanted to go back to California and see what it meant. Derek wanted to go with her, but Laura said no. They fought about it for hours.

Eventually, Laura said she didn’t want Derek to come because he was too violent. He was too likely to fly off the handle and make the situation worse. He wouldn’t be helpful, he couldn’t control himself or his wolf, and his blue eyes would make any hunter they came across trigger happy. None of that was true, Derek knew. He had ironclad control over his wolf and everyone knew it. None of it was true, but it hit Derek in the heart of his insecurities exactly like Laura had wanted, and he didn’t know how to respond.

Derek walked right out of their apartment. He wandered the streets until he found himself climbing the steps to Alpha Haversmith’s house. He still didn’t know how to explain himself, but he was shaking (again) and Alpha only needed one glance at him before she pulled him into her living room and sat him down on the couch between three other wolves. Alpha made him some tea, the Haversmith substitute for emotion, and Derek fell asleep surrounded by almost-packmates.

When he got back to their apartment the next morning, Laura was gone. Derek sat in their kitchen for a long moment feeling numb. Then he got out his laptop and booked the earliest flight he could find to Beacon Hills. The flight wasn’t until the next morning, and Derek stared at the neatly printed date until he was nearly hyperventilating.

He called Alpha Haversmith, explained what had happened between flutters of too-fast breath. Alpha didn’t like it, but she didn’t try to stop him. Instead, she asked if Derek would let any of her betas come with him. Derek couldn’t say no fast enough. He didn’t know what was going on in Beacon Hills, but he couldn’t be responsible for anyone else’s death.

Nineteen frantic hours of _nothing_ passed until Derek was finally on the plane, and then he had to sit for six more. By the time Derek had rented a car and driven into Beacon Hills, it was two in the afternoon. Laura wasn’t answering her phone, and Derek was frantic. He didn’t catch her scent driving through the town with his windows down, but he knew where she would have gone; the knowledge sat like a stone in his gut. Derek clenched his jaw as he made the familiar turnoff towards the preserve, then sliced up the inside of his mouth with his fangs when he turned up the driveway.

The house hunched blackened and dilapidated as he parked in front of it, the scent of smoke and wolfsbane still sharp in the air.

Derek had to take several deep breathes and rub his eyes, hard, to get the echos of fire out of his head. He stumbled out of the car and ran into the woods. He would find Laura, and then he would deal with the breakdown looming on his horizon.

But he never really found Laura. Two hours into his search, he found… parts.

He stumbled back from Laura’s glassy stare and was sick at the foot of a tree. He glanced back at her body after he finished heaving, and he… he couldn’t handle it. He lurched his way back to the burnt out shell of his house instead. He hid under the stairs and just sat there, shaking, tears spilling silently down his face. This time, there was no one to offer any comfort.

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on [tumblr](moretomhardy.tumblr.com)!


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